by Bethany-Kris
None at all.
And there he was, about to help deliver them to it.
Connor stayed back as the females huddled together, and the men made a circle around them, pointing out which ones they liked, which ones seemed dirty in a drug sense, or otherwise. A few of the younger ones were taken from the group immediately, their heads covered with black sacks, large zip-ties tightened to their neck to keep them from ripping the hoods off, and then placed in one of the many vans.
The scene went on and on, until no women stood in a huddle, and it was just the men left.
Connor spent the next several minutes, while the men chatted amongst themselves, trying to convince himself he could do this. As much as he hated it, and for as sick as it made him, he could put on the mask he’d been wearing his whole life and handle this shite. Since he was a young lad, he’d watched slaves come and go from his home. Some had nursed him when he was sick, fed him three meals a day, and helped him learn to read.
A couple had even been the mother he never had, though he didn’t like to think on them too much.
Aye, it took him years to understand what those women had been to his father—slaves—but he still knew now.
As long as he didn’t think too feckin’ much, or feel too much, he’d be okay. It was just like anything else he didn’t want to do—get in, get it done, and get the feck out.
Right?
Connor wasn’t so sure.
His despondence and disinterest only increased when Trevor motioned for the guard to unlock the second container. Connor figured it would be like the first, filled to the brim with dirty victims needing transported from the warehouse to their new situations within the city.
Apparently, that wasn’t to be.
The container looked all but empty at first glance. It was as dark as the first, though the smell wasn’t nearly as bad, and Connor instantly noticed a pile of books and drawing pencils near the door. Unlike the first, where the girls had to be screamed at to get them out, this woman came walking out on her own, wearing a black dress that fell to her bare knees, with nothing on her feet but for painted pink toenails.
Her hair was blonde.
Her eyes, green.
Just below the hollow of her throat rested a brand scarred into her skin that looked like a scripted C, and it was still angry and red enough to tell Connor it was rather new.
This was not a girl like the others.
She would not be placed in some whorehouse or salon.
She was an order.
She had likely been specially asked for, from her heritage, to her skin, eye, and hair color. Likely a virgin, but they weren’t always pure. Still, untainted by too many others, young enough to be kept for years yet to come, and rebellious enough to be trained properly, if that was what an owner wanted.
She stood in the opening of the container, and stared at each of the men, her gaze lingering on Connor in the back for a while longer than the rest. Maybe it was because he stood far back from the others, or because he didn’t try to approach her like they did when she moved, or even because he didn’t talk at all. He wasn’t sure, but her gaze kept going back to him.
Her hair wasn’t quite the same shade, and her eyes were not as vivid of a green as Evelyn’s, but it was enough of a comparison for Connor to feel like his lungs were being sucked out of his feckin’ chest. It was enough for him to see this slave, this bought for product, this human being, and think, She could have been Evelyn.
That killed him.
“Pretty thing, isn’t she?” Trevor asked as he came to stand beside Connor.
Connor hadn’t even realized the guy had moved. “Young, I would say.”
Trevor nodded. “That, too. Taken off a cruise ship over near Germany, less than a month ago. She’s a hot damn commodity right now—wanted, if you get my drift. Her buyer spent a lot of money to get his hands on her.”
“Is that so?”
“One of the very few orders I’ve had where he hand-picked the girl. Met her once, apparently, a year or so back, when her father brought her over to the States when he was doing business. Made for a difficult pick, but she didn’t fight too much.”
Connor cleared his throat, willing the uneasiness out of his tone. “Her brand—that important or something?”
“His request. We just fill the order.”
“I see.”
“You all right there, Connor?” Trevor asked, a hint of amusement coloring up his voice. “You seem a bit bored.”
Grand.
That was exactly what he wanted the bastard to think.
Sean had put Connor here for a damn reason. He didn’t doubt for a feckin’ second that his father planned on getting a report from his associates about how Connor had acted, reacted, and subsequently worked, while he was under their watchful eye. He hated this—all of it.
Right down to his blood and bones.
It disgusted him.
But until he understood why, until he knew what he could do to never have to stand in this place again and do this, Connor would get the job done.
“What’s first?” Connor asked, turning away from the girl.
She could be Evelyn.
It still rang in his mind like a toll bell, heavy and foreboding.
He pushed it away.
He’d deal with the hell in his head later.
That war always waited for when he was alone.
“First,” Trevor said, “you’re going to join Finnick for a drop off of one batch, and we’ll see if we need an extra pair of hands after that. If not, you’re free to go.”
“Drop off to where?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
With that, Trevor walked off, stopping only to talk to the man Connor believed was Finnick, and nodding back in his general direction. Though he didn’t mean to, Connor glanced back at the girl standing in the opening of the container. Now, Jonson was there with her, carefully wiping her down with a cloth and smoothing back any stray strands of hair.
Like a precious doll.
Her gaze strayed to Connor again.
Fear stared back at him.
He couldn’t look away.
He couldn’t save her, and he certainly couldn’t afford to let her physical similarities to Evelyn play any more into the current war that battled inside the privacy of his mind.
Connor was already trying to save another.
He was only just now realizing how true that actually was.
“She’s not going to stay here for the night,” Killian said, “not unless I feckin’ drug her to sleep or something.”
Connor paced the length of the upstairs hallway in his brownstone, willing his mind to slow for even a second so he could calm down enough and have a rational discussion. “What, did you piss her off? I swear to God, I’ll cut your feckin’ throat, if you did.”
“No. What is wrong with you?”
A lot of things.
A great many things.
Too many things.
“I just … need a bit of time,” Connor managed to say. “To get my thoughts together, maybe.”
It was only half the truth. He was entirely out of control, and had been slowly moving toward the edge of jumping right off into the land of crazy. He thought he would be able to handle it—doing the job, delivering the women, and going on his way no worse for wear. He figured as long as he kept his mouth shut and his head down, it wouldn’t be so bad.
He lied to himself.
With each stop—and each girl shuffled into a building with high, used, and dirty women—Connor felt a wee bit more hellish inside. He knew what he was doing, delivering them like he was, and it killed him.
His mask stayed firmly in place as he worked, his mind going a bit numb as dead eyes stared back at him, failing pleas falling from chapped lips, but inside … inside he had died.
Connor could hear Killian demanding some sort of answer, or even something to tell Evelyn as to why she couldn’t return just yet, but he didn’
t know what to say. He didn’t want to explain, he just wanted to be alone in his hell for a while.
“Just give me some time,” Connor said in a rush before ending the call.
It had been a long time since Connor was properly alone. He had moments throughout the day when the silence was so loud that he could hear his own heartbeat, but it wasn’t quite the same. He’d had Evelyn for a while—months, now—and with her, she never really gave him the chance to be totally alone.
It wasn’t that he minded, but this was different.
Connor shed his leather jacket as he headed for the bathroom. He thought a shower might help to clear his head, and once inside with the door closed, he did his best to avoid looking in the mirror.
He wasn’t sure that he would like the reflection staring back at him.
Not tonight.
He turned on the shower head to the large walk-in shower, and turned the water on scalding hot, stepping back and leaning against the glass doors. The steam started to fill the room within minutes, but Connor didn’t move to actually get inside the shower, too stuck in his own head to even try to clean the dirty feeling from his hands.
That feeling—that dirtiness—would never go away.
He knew that now.
He hated it.
Connor knew the very worst part had been when he did finally numb to the women and the job; when the girls’ scared faces filled his vision, when their frightened eyes pleaded to him for help without ever saying a word, and he’d felt nothing. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to feel nothing for their plight, but rather, he was trying to protect his own image and his own mind to what he was doing.
And in that moment, when he saw their fear, and he felt nothing, Connor realized how very much like his father he actually could be, when he needed to be. How dead inside, how cold and unfeeling of a human being—how lost of a soul.
It was the pain of that understanding that cut Connor the deepest. He’d done so well for so many years, hiding hurt and burying his problems with layers upon layers of ink on his body. He’d hidden scars and rows of cut marks with skulls surrounded by dying roses. He’d erased years of self-harm and self-deprecation with art he wouldn’t ever dare to ruin. His efforts to bleed out every bit of pain he had felt in his life, the things that made him horrible and awful and undeserving, finally stopped the more skin and scars he covered up.
All that work—all his efforts to ignore the desire to force the hatred and pain out—was gone, just like that.
Connor tugged his shirt off, the lingering scent of cigarettes and stale liquor hanging heavily on the fabric, even after he’d tossed it to the floor. Moving had been a mistake, as it put him directly in front of the mirror, and when he looked up, he only saw a familiar demon staring back at him.
Not himself, with his own features and eyes, but someone all too familiar with the same dark eyes, the same grim sneer, and a profile that spoke of an unfeeling creature. He didn’t see himself, he saw his father.
The urge—the long dormant habit he had kept at bay—to cut what he didn’t like from his body banged around in his mind, like a monster in its cage. Roaring as loudly as it possibly could, and rattling the bars.
It would help …
He would feel good …
It’ll all be gone, for a while …
Connor knew none of those self-harming thoughts were actually true, considering it had been years since he’d put a blade to his own skin purposely, and he still dealt with his inner demons whether he cut or not. But that didn’t mean they were easy to ignore, or even that he wanted to ignore them.
Those urges of his had been handled in other ways over the years—the pain of a tattoo machine, and the resulting work on his body; the men he was asked to punish for whatever their wrongs had been by using his skills to draw as much pain and blood from a living body as was possible. He’d satisfied that shite for a long time.
Too long, maybe.
Slowly, his reflection disappeared in the bathroom mirror, covered by the fog and steam hanging low in the air, and damn near making it hard to breathe. It didn’t matter, it was already too late, and he only vaguely realized his action of pulling one of his many knives from his pocket.
The blade was heavy in his hand, the sharp edge biting against his scarred palm as he squeezed his fingers around the metal.
Connor distinctly remembered every cut he had ever made to anything and everything, over the years of his life, including ones to his own body. He remembered how thinner blades, or even razors, could make the worst slices because of how deep they could go, yet still managed to appear insignificant on the surface until they started to bleed. Sharp blades and dull knives, anything could get it done with the right amount of pressure.
It was cause and effect.
Create pain to destroy pain.
Create scars to hide scars.
Cut in, bleed out.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Perhaps his many years of not harming his own person should have been enough to teach him that the high was only temporary, and the feeling would eventually dim before the anxiety and pain came rushing back again.
He should have known.
Connor only felt relief when he pulled on the handle of the knife, drawing it out of his clenched fist, slicing open skin without barely trying at all.
He only wished that relief would have helped.
It didn’t.
Not the first, second, or even the third time.
• • •
“Connor?”
Under the spray of the large shower head, and behind the glass doors, Connor vaguely heard the muffled call of his name. He thought it was just his imagination playing tricks on him, giving him what he wanted, not what he actually had.
Evelyn, that was.
The sting of the scalding water kept him coherent enough to stay on his feet, while the constant throbbing in his hand, wrapped in crimson-stained gauze, kept him focused enough not to care.
“Connor?”
Her voice was louder the second time—closer, too.
Connor looked up from his spot under the constant spray of water, and through his foggy vision, he saw the form move in closer. Evelyn’s pretty, yet concerned, features took better shape the closer she came. She didn’t seem bothered at all by the hot water, barely reacting when she was hit with the spray, and unconcerned that her dress was getting soaked.
Breathe in, breathe out.
The mechanics of life seemed so entirely foreign to Connor in those moments. A haze had settled over his mind well over an hour ago, as he watched interesting rivulets of red slide from his clenched palm, down his wrists, and then disappear into a drain. He’d yet to get it to lift fully, but at least his mind wasn’t so crazy now.
Foggy.
Unclear.
High.
Not crazy.
“Connor,” Evelyn said softly, her hands coming up to touch his face with the sweetest touch. “Hey.”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
She should be away.
He’d sent her away.
That was what he needed, or rather, he had thought he needed it.
“I wanted to come home,” she told him. “Killian brought me back—said I screech too much.”
That was amusing, considering Evelyn didn’t screech at all. She was too quiet for that nonsense, too stuck in her own world to care about others.
He liked that about her.
“Your hand is bleeding,” Evelyn said, carefully lifting his roughly bandaged hand in her own. She turned his palm up, looking over the blood-soaked bandage with a furrowed brow. “Why are you bleeding?”
“Home, you said.”
Evelyn glanced up at him. “What?”
“You said home. You wanted to come home.”
“Of course I did.”
Of course.
Like it was so simple.
As though he should already know.
Connor wasn’t
sure that he did.
“It’s a pretty sad state of a home, isn’t it?” Connor asked. “I’m not sure it even feels like that to me.”
“You’re the closest thing I’ve ever had to it,” she replied.
He didn’t miss her choice of words.
Him, not the place.
“How long has this been bleeding?” Evelyn asked.
“An hour or so,” he answered. “It’s fine, it’ll staunch. It’s not the first time it has happened.”
Evelyn frowned, glancing back over her shoulder, back the way she had come. Connor didn’t have to follow her gaze to know what she was looking for, or rather, what she was seeing. His knife, still bloodied, sitting on the edge of the sink. An unrolled mess of gauze on the floor. Blood drops needing cleaned.
Chaos.
A desperate truth.
It was a beautiful lie, too.
He still didn’t feel any better.
Silently, Evelyn lifted his other hand, and flipped his palm up. Her thumb traced over the carved shamrock there with slow strokes, again and again.
“How often?” she asked.
That one was easy. “Not often at all.”
Still, her thumb moved over the shamrock again. “But often enough.”
She was calling him on his lie, the same one he told himself over and over again. That he focused the urge elsewhere, that he had it under control. If that were the case, the scarred ridges of the shamrocks in his palms would not be so large, with so many distinct lines.
“Not often at all,” Connor repeated.
“Still enough,” she whispered.
“It was an easy way to deal with everything when I was young.” He avoided her searching gaze, if only because he might not like the pity staring back at him. He was cowardly in that way. Desperate for relief, even if that meant hurting himself, yet ashamed of the reaction it might draw in others because of it. “I thought it was interesting, how different tools could make such different lines, how thin blades could make the deepest cuts. It only got more involved—worse—the older I got. It’s a hard thing to hide, though nobody really pointed it out on purpose.”
“But you knew that they knew,” she pressed.
Connor shrugged. “I didn’t want to feel so crazy all the time. I thought if I hid them in a more permanent way, then it would go away altogether. If I couldn’t see it, then it didn’t exist.”